Deep Reorganization: Retaining Residuals in TinyML

Hashan Roshantha Mendis, Chih-Kai Kang, Chun-Han Lin, Ming-Syan Chen, Pi-Cheng Hsiu

Abstract: Designing intelligent, tiny devices with limited memory is immensely challenging, exacerbated by the additional memory requirement of residual connections in deep neural networks. In contrast to existing approaches that eliminate residuals to reduce peak memory usage at the cost of significant accuracy degradation, this paper presents DERO, which reorganizes residual connections by leveraging insights into the types and interdependencies of operations across residual connections. Evaluations were conducted across diverse model architectures designed for common computer vision applications. DERO consistently achieves peak memory usage comparable to plain-style models without residuals, while closely matching the accuracy of the original models with residuals.